Wednesday, July 9, 2025

It is the 9th of July 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis. 

As I prepare for my family vacation, I'm stacking shows on top of each other in a manner unusual for this show —it does make it apt that I’m writing this show, about America’s so-called “Heretic Patriot,” on the 4th of July. He was Jonathan Mayhew, while I just finished the show on Peter the Hermit, and my brain keeps mixing up the two, giving me “Peter Mayhew,” who was Chewbacca.

But who was this Jonathan Mayhew- a man we might characterize as the “Heretic Patriot”? He was a fascinating and polarizing figure in colonial America who revealed some of the uncomfortable bedfellows made in the revolutionary age.

Mayhew was born in 1720 on Martha’s Vineyard- his family had already been in the New World for 80 years, his grandfather, Thomas Mayhew, acquired the colonial grants for Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Jonathan’s father, Experience Mayhew, was a missionary to the natives and the author of a bilingual psalter. Experience was a proponent of preaching the gospel to the natives but also respecting their autonomy and not using the gospel as a pretense for making them assimilate. This balancing of concerns, both theological and political, would make an impression on young Jonathan.

Jonathan attended Harvard between 1740 and 1744, and despite a brief encounter with George Whitefield and Revivalism, he would gravitate towards the likes of Edward Wigglesworth and the so-called liberals.

The Theological liberalism of Mayhew and his ilk might be understood as a kind of “revolutionary liberalism” that we see in the Early Modern Era with its reformations and revolutions. As everything is being turned on its ear and old norms are being adjusted, we might be a little lenient in our judgment of those who pushed beyond what would become the boundaries of orthodoxy.

Mayhew would push two particular boundaries: the first was that the role of the will in human salvation was thus branded an Arminian against the Calvinist orthodoxy of his day. But there was wiggle room amongst colonial evangelicals when it came to questions of the will. But there was less stomach for denying the trinity, or doing anything that smelled of doing so. The Unitarian explosion in the Northeast is still decades away, but Mayhew bushed that boundary early, studying under Ebenezer Gay, the so-called “Father of Unitarianism in America”. It was so controversial that when Mayhew was ordained in 1747, no ministers in Boston would assent, and it was first postponed until ministers outside of Boston could be brought in to assist.

As a preacher, he was more popular in Britain than in the colonies, although the controversy surrounding his name did lead to a wider audience than other supposed “heretics”. But it was in 1750 that he would begin to cement his legacy. It came in a sermon on the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I that was titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers”. It was an explication of Romans 13- the “obey your leaders” passage, and in it, Mayhew made the argument (or borrowed the argument and re-popularized it for the colonies) that Christians only owed fealty to legitimate authority. This sermon would become, according to John Adams, the “catechism” of the revolution, with everyone becoming familiar with its arguments. In this argument against the British, Mayhew coined a phrase, “no taxation without representation”.

From pariah to patriot, in the service of liberty, there was more of a stomach for a preacher whose views were suspect, and many radicals began to rally around the preacher, such that a sermon in 1765 that argued against the Stamp Act led to riots.

Mayhew would succumb to a fever on this, the 9th of July in 1766, at only 46 and before the fruits of his revolutionary fervor could come to fruition. His theological liberalism would be subordinated under his patriotism and political theology, making him an unlikely (although emblematic) religious leader of the American Revolution: Jonathan Mayhew.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and the Yodh section of Psalm 119:

Your hands made me and formed me;
    give me understanding to learn your commands.

May those who fear you rejoice when they see me,

    for I have put my hope in your word.

I know, Lord, that your laws are righteous,

    and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.

May your unfailing love be my comfort,

    according to your promise to your servant.

Let your compassion come to me that I may live,

    for your law is my delight.

May the arrogant be put to shame for wronging me without cause;

    but I will meditate on your precepts.

May those who fear you turn to me,

    those who understand your statutes.

May I wholeheartedly follow your decrees,

    that I may not be put to shame.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 9th of July 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man, our very own Chewbacca- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man more Ewok than Wookie-I’m the cuddly Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.